Hey. I haven’t dunned you all week for our prospective Democratic congress-critters. Let’s fix that. I don’t expect something for nothing. Let me share a song from my personal reel of proto-rock songs.

I’m well aware of Louis Jordan, Ike Turner’s Rocket 88 and all that stuff. My list doesn’t just have backbeat-y songs that sound like early rock and roll. I’ve found some early songs here and there that have the energy and spirit of good rock music. Here, just listen:

Isn’t that fine? Maybe you know a few good ones too.

Let’s keep up the good work with 70 most competitive congressional races according to Swing Left.

Roseanne Cash, in the NYTimes — “Country Musicians, Stand Up to the N.R.A.”:

I’ve been a gun-control activist for 20 years. Every time I speak out on the need for stricter gun laws, I get a new profusion of threats. There’s always plenty of the garden-variety “your dad would be ashamed of you” sexist nonsense, along with the much more menacing threats to my family and personal safety.

Last year, I performed at the Concert Across America to End Gun Violence with Jackson Browne, Eddie Vedder, Marc Cohn and the Harlem Gospel Choir, and we got death threats. People wanted to kill us because we wanted to end gun violence. That’s where we are: America, 2017.

For the past few decades, the National Rifle Association has increasingly nurtured an alliance with country music artists and their fans. You can see it in “N.R.A. Country,” which promotes the artists who support the philosophical, and perhaps economic, thrall of the N.R.A., with the pernicious tag line “Celebrate the Lifestyle.”

That wholesome public relations veneer masks something deeply sinister and profoundly destructive. There is no other way to say this: The N.R.A. funds domestic terrorism.

A shadow government exists in the world of gun sales, and the people who write gun regulations are the very people who profit from gun sales. The N.R.A. would like to keep it that way…

I encourage more artists in country and American roots music to end your silence. It is no longer enough to separate yourself quietly. The laws the N.R.A. would pass are a threat to you, your fans, and to the concerts and festivals we enjoy.

The stakes are too high to not disavow collusion with the N.R.A. Pull apart the threads of patriotism and lax gun laws that it has so subtly and maliciously intertwined. They are not the same…

… [W]hile there’s no reason to expect major country stars to suddenly risk their fan bases by speaking out in favor of new gun control legislation, the country music industry is changing, thanks to streaming services that are breaking radio’s stranglehold on the industry and a newer cohort of more under-the-radar Americana artists who are more outspoken than their mainstream counterparts.

For at least one mainstream country musician, Sunday night was in fact a turning point. Guitarist for the Texas-based Josh Abbott Band, Caleb Keeter, was at the festival on the day of the massacre, and living through the experience of a mass shooting firsthand was enough to make him rethink his own stance on gun control. “I cannot express how wrong I was,” he said in a Twitter post on Monday morning, still reeling from the shock of the attack after shielding himself from the gunfire on the floor of his tour bus. “We need gun control RIGHT. NOW. My biggest regret is that I stubbornly didn’t realize it until my brothers on the road and myself were threatened by it.”…Read more

1. Error or malice. It is hardly news to anyone reading this that police and prosecutors f**k up. Death at the hands of the state renders those errors permanently uncorrectable. As a citizen in whose name the state kills, I can’t accept that moral burden.

That some cases, like Tsarnaev’s, are open and shut doesn’t alter the moral and practical force of the argument above, I think, basically because the moment you introduce discretion into death penalty jurisprudence, you re-open the possibility of error or malice. If the standard is overwhelming obviousness, then who decides; who processes the evidence in support of that definition, and so on. The only way to be certain you’re not killing innocents is not to kill anyone under the cover of state sanction.

If that makes me soft, so be it.

2. Soft or not, I’m vengeful, too. To my mind, LWOP is a fate worse than death. Because I do not believe in an afterlife, the only punishments that matter, like the only rewards, are those we receive in this life. Fifty years in a maximum or super-max prison is, to me, a much more thorough and exemplary penalty than oblivion.

3. I’m practical. See reason one. Cops and government lawyers f**k up. We kill their errors and the urgency of addressing particular patterns of incompetence, indifference, and outright viciousness diminishes. Patterns of bad behavior and unjust outcomes become much harder to discern. Any hope, slim as it may be, of creating a better, more justice-driven law-enforcement system, evaporates when the living reasons to address current injustices disappear. If we want to make things better, we need not to kill the people whom the system failed. Simple as that.

That’s a pretty good short-version of how I see it, probably in the order I’d weight them. I’m sure I could come up with more, and FSM knows, seeing as it’s me, I could go on a lot more on the three planks above. But that’s the gist.

ETA: One more thing: Just to be clear. I’m no Gandhi. I’m not non-violent. But I’m anti-violence. The fact that we (in theory) surrender to the state a monopoly on violence means that we need to hedge that power around with a mighty wall. Not killing those in our power, even the most evil, is part of that wall. Whether the more pragmatic arguments above carry greater weight some days than others, at bottom there is a moral imperative that I can’t find a way to avoid: when we, or I, don’t need to kill, choosing to do so anyway is wrong.

Nearly fifty years after marching for voting rights in Alabama, Coleman testified in federal court today in Winston-Salem against North Carolina’s new voting restrictions, which have been described as the most onerous in the nation. The law mandates strict voter ID, cuts early voting by a week and eliminates same-day registration, among many other things. After the bill’s passage, “I was devastated,” Coleman testified. “I felt like I was living life over again. Everything that I worked for for the last fifty years was being lost.”The federal government and civil rights groups, including the ACLU and the North Carolina NAACP, asked Judge Thomas Schroeder, a George W. Bush appointee for the Middle District of North Carolina, to enjoin key provisions of the law before the 2014 midterms under Section 2 of the VRA.

After the hearing, eight hundred North Carolinians gathered in downtown Winston-Salem for a “Moral March to the Polls” event protesting the law. “I know it’s hot out here,” Barber told the crowd. “But it’s going to be hotter if you let them take our vote away.”

In other news, True the Vote had to dismiss their Mississippi lawsuit. Despite this headline:

Tea Party surrogates True the Vote have voluntarily given up a lawsuit in North MS Federal District Court after Judge Michael Mills read them the riot act on Monday.

I don’t think the judge “read them the riot act”. He thinks they’re in the wrong court so ordered them to “show cause” why they filed where they did and they then dismissed. It’s not like he told them to STFU.

https://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/balloon_juice_header_logo_grey.jpg00Kayhttps://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/balloon_juice_header_logo_grey.jpgKay2014-07-08 14:49:302014-07-08 14:49:30Have to get up pretty early in the morning to beat Rev. Barber